Athénée Royal Ernest Solvay school where Rene Magritte studied from 1913 till October 1915.
College/University
Gallery of René Magritte
Rue du Midi 144, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium
The Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts) in Brussels where Rene Magritte studied from 1916 to 1918.
Career
Gallery of René Magritte
1928
Rene Magritte painting Attempting the Impossible.
Gallery of René Magritte
1928
Rene Magritte painting The Empty Mask (Le masque vide), Le Perreux-sur-Marne. Photo from Charly Herscovici Collection.
Gallery of René Magritte
1934
(Left to right) E.L.T Mesens, Rene Magritte, Louis Scutenaier, André Souris and Paul Nougé. (Seated) Iréne Hamoir, Marthe Beauvoisin and Georgette Magritte. Studio Joe Rentmeesters. Photo from Charly Herscovici Collection.
Gallery of René Magritte
1936
Rene Magritte painting Clairvoyance. Photo by Jacqueline Nonkels.
Gallery of René Magritte
1938
Rene Magritte and The Barbarian (Le Barbare), London Gallery, London. Photo courtesy of Brachot Gallery, Brussels.
Gallery of René Magritte
1960
Rene Magritte with Le Sens de Réalité in the background. Photo by Shunk Kender.
Gallery of René Magritte
1964
Rene Magritte at work in his living room.
Gallery of René Magritte
1966
Rene Magritte in front of his La magie noire. Photo by Photothèque R. Magritte / Adagp Images, Paris.
(Left to right) E.L.T Mesens, Rene Magritte, Louis Scutenaier, André Souris and Paul Nougé. (Seated) Iréne Hamoir, Marthe Beauvoisin and Georgette Magritte. Studio Joe Rentmeesters. Photo from Charly Herscovici Collection.
Rene Magritte was a Belgian surrealist painter. He combined reality and visionary world in his eccentric paintings. The main character of his several images is a noble gentleman in a bowler hat as well as such typical attributes as the female torso, the castle, the rock, the window.
Background
Rene Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, Belgium, on November 21, 1898. He was a son of Leopold Magritte, a dressmaker and textile merchant, and Regina Magritte, a milliner.
Rene had two younger brothers, Raymond and Paul.
Education
Rene Magritte received his primary education at Châtelet primary school which he had attended for six years from 1904. The first year of secondary school was also spent in the town, where by the age of twelve, Magritte had become a pupil in the painting studio of an artist Félicien Defoin.
As a child, Rene was fascinated by the cinema, movies posters and adverts, as well as by photography. His favorite personage was Fantomas. Rene's father gifted a son a photo camera and Rene created small color movies with it. The boy was also interested in literature. He read such authors as Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Maurice Leblanc, and Gaston Leroux.
When Magritte was fourteen-year-old boy, he lost his mother who committed a self-destruction by drowning in the River Sambre. Rene and his two brothers were then brought up by a gouvernante Jeanne Verdeyen who became their father's wife in 1928.
After the family moved to Charleroi in 1913, Rene pursued his studies in the Athénée Royal Ernest Solvay (Athénée Royal de Charleroi by the time) till the October of 1915.
A year later, Magritte entered the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (Academy of Fine Arts) which he left in 1918 because the training was boring for him. A Belgian painter Emile Vandamme-Sylva, an illustrator and lithographer Gisbert Combaz, as well as a symbolist Constant Montald, were among his teachers at the Academy. Magritte also attended the literature course of Georges Eekhoud, a Belgian novelist.
Rene Magritte created his first painting, which was impressionistic, about 1915, but his professional career started in the studio which he established four years later along with Pierre-Louis Flouquet, his friend from the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts.
In association with several young artists, poets, and musicians from Brussels, including brothers Pierre Bourgeois and Victor Bourgeois, Magritte helped to publish four issues of the review Au Volant! in 1919. That same year, he exhibited his first canvas, a Cubistic picture Three Women.
After one year of military service in the Belgian infantry in Beverlo, Belgium which Magritte joined in 1920, he occupied a post of a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory Peters-Lacroix in 1922, and designed posters until 1926. He then signed a contract with Brussels's Galerie Le Centaure where he had worked till its closing in 1929.
The first surrealist work by Magritte, The Lost Jockey, was presented at his first one-man show, organized by the Galerie in 1927. The exhibition was a critical failure, and that same year the artist moved to the Surrealist center, Paris, befriending poet Paul Eluard and André Breton, spokesman for the movement. The Surrealists, who included writers and composers too, overturned conventional notions by exercising their unconscious impulses for creative effect, and Magritte's paintings often took on a bizarre, dream-like quality. The painter investigated these new non-formalist concerns working at a rapid rate. Many of his works of the period, in keeping with Surrealist practices, disclosed a sinister side of human personality, as Pleasure (1926) or The Threatened Assassin (1926-1927).
At the same time, Rene Magritte started to work with text. He wrote an essay Words and Images about the differences between words and images in the context of their compatibilities to denote objects. This article became a part of the 1929 manifesto called The Surrealist Revolution. Magritte incorporated the text in some of his paintings as well, the most famous of which is The Treachery of Images with a pipe accompanied by the inscription "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). This semantic investigation of the connection between language and visual source is also evident in his Key of Dreams series (1930s) in which depicted objects don't necessarily conform with the labels below them.
In 1930, Magritte broke with the Surrealists and came back to Brussels where he continued to draw for advertisements and opened an agency with his brother Paul.
The first artist's solo show which made him popular all around the world took place at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in 1936 and at the London Gallery in 1938. This time, Magritte had a great number of commissions.
During the 1940s, Rene Magritte experimented briefly with Impressionism (1940-1945), a period called "Renoir Period," and a brash Fauve-inspired style (1948) dubbed "Vache" (literally, cow). One of the works of the first-mentioned period is The Forbidden Universe (1943). However, the experiments weren't successful and soon the painter returned to his surrealistic paintings which he produced for the rest of his life.
The Сenter of Textile Workers in Belgium (celebration on 18th september)
(Project of poster.)
The Center of Textile Workers in Belgium
(Project of poster.)
The Center of Textile Workers in Belgium
(Project of poster.)
The Center of Textile Workers in Belgium
(Project of poster.)
Project for a Mural, Norine House, Brussels
Advertisment for "Norine"
Poster for Cigarettes "Belga"
Advertisment for "Norine"
Advertisment for "Norine"
Advertisment for "Norine"
Project for a mural, Norine House, Brussels
Advertisment for "Norine"
Advertisment for "Norine"
Advertisment for "Norine"
Advertisment for "Norine"
Advertisment for "Norine"
Advertisment for "Norine"
Advertisment for "Norine"
painting
The Return of the Flame
The Delights of Landscape
Call of Peaks
Courtesan's Palace
The Beneficial Promise
Midnight Marriage
Young Girl Eating a Bird (The Pleasure)
Exciting Perfumes by Mem
The Human Condition
Georgette at the Piano
The Acrobat's Exercises
The Therapist
The Victory
A Famous Man
The Obsession
The End of Contemplation
Companions of Fear
The Light of Coincidence
The Human Condition
Youth Illustrated
Applied Dialectics
The Glass House
The Birth of Idol
The White Race
Deep Waters
Primevera
The Disguised Symbol
The Catapult of Desert
The Domain of Arnheim
The Cultivation of Ideas
Favorable Omens
Portrait of Pierre Broodcoorens
The Domain of Arnheim
Untitled
Adulation of Space
Checkmate
The Man of the Sea
The Discovery of Fire
The Fair Captive
A Panic in the Middle Ages
Blue Cinema
Eternity
The Symmetrical Trick
Modern
Nocturne
The Cut Glass Bath
The Living Mirror
Nude
The Window
Portrait of E.L.T. Mesens
Portrait of Pierre Bourgeois
Donna
The Clearing
The Intelligence
The Empty Mask
Meditation
The Harvest
Natural Encounters
Elective Affinities
Representation
The Six Elements
Faraway Looks
The Voice of Space
Three Nudes in an Interior
Act of Violence
The False Mirror
Man Reading a Newspaper
Perpetual Motion
The Future of Statues
The Model
Soir d'Orage, Strange Perfume by Mem
The Difficult Crossing
Bather
The Forest
The Beyond
The Titanic Days
Plain of Air
The Therapeutist
The Muscles of the Sky
The Red Model
Portrait
The Lost Jockey
The Comic Spirit
The Reckless Sleeper
The Sea of Flames
The Eternal Evidence
Georgette
The Conqueror
Threshold of Forest
The Perfume of the Abyss
The Break in the Clouds (The Calm)
After the Water, the Clouds
The Present
The Interpretation of Dreams
The Face of Genius
Composition on a Seashore
On the Threshold of Liberty
The Submissive Reader
Island of Treasures
Attempting the Impossible
Alice in Wonderland
The Voice of Space
Georgette Magritte
Clairvoyance (Self-portrait)
The Lovers
Forbidden Literature (The Use of the Word)
The Familiar Objects
Landscape
Black Flag
The Double Secret
The Secret Player
The Smile
The Invention of Life
Flowers of Evil
A Taste of the Invisible
The Silver Gap
The Titanic Days
The Domain of Arnheim
Early Morning
Black Magic
Collective Invention
The Finery of the Storm
A Storm
Pink Belles, Tattered Skies
Imp of the Perverse
The Amorous Perpective
Landscape
The First Day
Wreackage of the Shadow
Time Transfixed
The Revealing of the Present
The Menaced Assassin
Unexpected Answer
Popular Panorama
Swift Hope
The Hunters at the Edge of Night
Reclining Nude
Black Magic
Secret Life IV
The Marches of Summer
Homesickness
Intermission
Not to be Reproduced
The Giantess
Philosopher's Lamp
The Sensational News
The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James)
The Tree of Knowledge
Youth
Polar Light
The Pipe
Rape
Threatening Weather
Rape
The Meaning of Night
The Taste of Tears
The Red Model
The Key to the Fields
The Flood
The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)
The Musings of the Solitary Walker
The Lining of Sleep
Homage to Mack Sennett
The Ladder of Fire
One Night Museum
The Fire
In Praise of Dialectics
The Heart of the Matter
The Female Thief
The Dawn of Cayenne
Bathers
Annunciation
Untitled
Bather between Light and Darkness
The Return
Discovery
Copper Handcuffs
Self-portrait
The Son of Man
Golconda
The Empire of Light
The Lovers II
Politics
Rene Magritte became a member of the Communist Party in 1932. The artist had been occasionally leaving and rejoining it for few years.
Views
Quotations:
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present."
"Visible things can be invisible. However, our powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible – and I make use of painting to render thoughts visible."
"If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream."
"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."
"The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown."
"Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life."
"I do not like money, either for itself or for what it can buy, since I want nothing we know about."
"It is not my intention to make anything comprehensible. I am of the opinion that there are sufficient paintings which one understands after a shorter or longer delay, and that therefore some incomprehensible painting would now be welcome. I am at pains to deliver such, as far as possible."
"I do not think I know any circumstances who would have determined my character, neither my art. I do not believe in 'determinism'."
"I despise my own past and that of others. I despise resignation, patience, professional heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers' voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of naphtha, the news, and drunks.I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street. I hope for vibrant love, the impossible, the chimerical. I dread knowing precisely my own limitations."
"As regards the artists themselves, most of them gave up their freedom quite lightly, placing their art at the service of someone or something. As a rule, their concerns and their ambitions are those of any old careerist. I thus acquired a total distrust of art and artists, whether they were officially recognised or were endeavouring to become so, and I felt that I had nothing in common with this guild. I had a point of reference which held me elsewhere, namely that magic within art which I had encountered as a child."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Dr. Ken Wach: "Magritte's art used images as a poet might use words; that is, in ways that new meanings, unnoticed harmonies, curious insights, subtle inflections and penetrating observations might be made. As with good poetry, they are not must made as 'interesting' asides, but create to feature as instances of heightened states of mind. Furthermore, like good poetry, Magritte's images in painting, drawings, prints, films and photography have uplift. They promote thought and have an aesthetic punch that dislodges the all-too-common anaesthesia of incurious everyday life."
Connections
Rene Magritte met his future wife, Georgette Berger, a daughter of a baker, in August 1913. They lost each other at the outbreak of World War I, but reunited about ten years later and finally married.
René Magritte
This book describes the life and career of Rene Magritte.
2003
Museums of the Mind: Magritte's Labyrinth and Other Essays in the Arts
Ellen Handler Spitz guides us through a maze of surreal paintings by René Magritte, with psychoanalytic thought as her beacon. She also leads us on a kaleidoscopic journey through other "museums of the mind," where interrelated works in drama, film, cartoon art, poetry, and opera are illuminated and rediscovered.
1994
Magritte: The Treachery of Images
The book offers fresh interpretations of the artist's use of symbols and imagery to articulate his particular brand of surrealism. A collection of revelatory essays focuses on five common images in Magritte's work, fire, shadows, curtains, words, and the fragmented body.
2017
Rene Magritte: Now You See It – Now You Don't
This book introduces children to Magritte's crazy, topsy-turvy world full of riddles and secrets and to the concept of seeing everyday things differently.
1998
Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images
he Los Angeles County Museum of Art brings together more than 50 of the most important Magritte's art with an equal number of very significant works by contemporary artists, both cool and edgy, including Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, and others.
Magritte
This magisterial volume by David Sylvester, the foremost expert on Magritte's work, offers 40 chapters of critical insights and clues to Magritte's puzzles, and over 500 lush full-color illustrations, making it an unparalleled source for understanding and appreciating an enormously popular and remarkably creative artist.